During his lecture Friday morning, Chris Hayes used Zohran Mamdani’s success in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary to frame how attention has transformed in the digital age.
“What is the biggest obstacle? What do you have to do to go from polling at 0% — which he was at the time — to defeating probably the best-known politician (former Gov. Andrew Cuomo) in the state?” asked Hayes. “You have to get people’s attention.”
Hayes took to the Amphitheater stage to close out the Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week One theme of “Themes of Transformation: Forces Shaping Our Tomorrow.” Hayes works as an MSNBC news anchor, an author and an editor-at-large for The Nation.
During his lecture, he talked about how our world runs on commodified attention, which can both help win elections and increase alienation.
Reflecting on what made Mamdani successful, Hayes dug into nominee’s formula.
“What he starts doing is making short-form viral videos,” Hayes said. “(In) the first one he makes that goes viral, he goes to two different neighborhoods in New York City about a week and a half after the (presidential) election, neighborhoods that swung the most heavily towards Donald Trump in 2024.”
Mamdani’s bold moves grabbed attention, and he embraced his time in the spotlight, whether he was on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” or a Pakistani news channel.
To Hayes, distinct competitiveness for our attention needs to appeal to the greatest number of people possible, even if that impacts quality.
“At one level we have this kind of biological inheritance, this universal drive,” he said. “What that means is at the scale of global industrial competitive capitalism, if you are trying to sell food en masse to as many people as possible, what you end up selling is French fries, ketchup and Coca-Cola, which you can sell anywhere in the world.”
Hayes paired the fast food example of attention with that of how slot machine resembles a modern phone.
“The way the slot machine model works, people will sit out for 8 to 10 hours, in by far the highest grossing parts of a casino, (and slot machines) never tell you a story, ” said Hayes. “It does not have a narrative arc, it is a set of iterative resolutions, and I do not think it is an accident that even the vertical visual experience of a slot machine is replicated in vertical video.”
Hayes utilizes the term “siren” for the loss of control over our own attention in his 2025 bestseller The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. He begins his book with the image of Odysseus sailing past the sirens in Mythos who attempted to lure him to his death by distracting him from his ship. In response, Odysseus had to put wax in the ears of his crew, tying himself to the mast to gain control of his own attention.
“We are all Odysseus on the mast in every waking moment of modern life,” said Hayes.
He also referenced the cocktail party effect, in which an individual can tune out every other voice, in a sea of voices, to focus on just one. Hayes compared it to the attentional overload of a casino. Talking to someone is using voluntary attention. In the same party, when a waiter drops a tray of glasses, everyone involuntarily looks, disrupting attention. When everyone returns to talking, there is a notice of other conversations that were originally blocked out.
The one stimulus that can consistently distract a person is the mention of their own name. Hayes said this is “a force that is as powerful as the call of a siren or as the crashing of the glasses.”
This effect is used in social media, when users are tagged in photos. There is a degree of interruption that social media uses, like sirens calling to Odyesseus.
This human draw to attention begins at birth, the newborn being the most useless in the animal kingdom, according to Hayes. The cry of a newborn is the very first means of compelling attention.
The very idea of human attention has become exploited: “That thing that makes us human, the thing that we have as our original inheritance, this need for social attention is now in the hands of people that want to grab it and exploit it for their own purposes,” Hayes said.
This has led to an era of alienation, according to Hayes. He uses the narrative of a modern shoemaker and a shoemaker of a pre-industrialization era. The shoemaker in the pre-industrialization era sees a progression of his shoe, and at the end of the process, owns that shoe. A modern shoemaker, working in a sweatshop stamping soles, only has their trade without a product.
“In the aggregate, labor is very valuable, but each individual worker’s slice of that value is tiny,” said Hayes.
“That exact same paradox exists with our attention. If you aggregate attention enough at scale, you will be worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars,” Hayes said.
Hayes reflected on seeing a social media page with recipes from the 1960s and 1970s centered around Jell-O, and how those recipes are viewed as a low point for the food industry.
“The reason it was sort of a low point is because in all kinds of different ways, people began to rebel against that food culture,” he said.
Farmers and local food markets gained more notoriety, which decreased the popularity of these Jell-O recipes, revolutionizing the food industry. “My contention to you today is that we are in the lime Jell-O macaroni salad era of attention capitalism,” said Hayes.
He referenced Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, in which Haidt discusses the impact phones have on children. In response to this movement, Hayes predicts a sort of rebellion against having to rely on phones. The desire to change relationships with phones from individuals to children is going to be a large step for society.
Comparing phones to cigarettes, Hayes views a future in which we are able to regain control over our own attention — but admitted that “if we are extending the metaphor, I am a two-pack-a-day smoker.”
He noted Chautauqua Institution as a place where people are able to put their phones away and live in the moment. Places that are going to bring people together in communal spaces are important in battling this.
“Fundamentally, this sort of rebellion against the alienation and extraction of attention capitalism is part of a larger movement in the face of an avalanche of political, technological and economic changes that are coming for us to reduce and degrade the value of us as humans to reassert its primacy and importance,” said Hayes.
Regulating “attention pollution” is one of these ways to win back the attention of both adults and children.
Hayes reflected on how to win back the attention of younger kids. He emphasized getting involved in phone-free policies in classrooms. Hayes referenced “Saturday Night Live” ’s policy on having phones in public performances: they don’t go through a process of putting phones in a bag, they trust the audience to keep it in their pockets.
However, Hayes said, the COVID-19 pandemic was “a little bit like the meteor and the dinosaurs” for attention spans.
There was a loss because children had to be on a screen, using a meeting software that was meant for adults. However, he does think there is an avenue for recovery. Even though it took a while for church and theater sizes to replenish to pre-pandemic proportions, they did adjust.
To Hayes, attention grabbing is what he sells. “The way I come to think about this exogenous force is like the wind and the powers of the sailboat,” Hayes said. “A sailboat is my show. It does not have an internal combustion engine, and it cannot go anywhere without attention.”
One of the ways to keep this attention, rather than grab it, is to build up trust, authority and credibility. It gives him more “latitude,” more of a range, but the ability to draw an audience’s attention is never fully certain.
“I have to grab and hold people’s attention for a living,” he said, “and to the extent I am no longer able to do that, I get put out to pasture.”
Being unable to grab attention does not just affect news anchors. In New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, there was another candidate on the ballot who came in third: Brad Lander. Hayes has known Lander for a while and calls him a friend, but acknowledged why Lander was not the elected Democratic nominee.
“He is a very, very competent, accomplished public servant who just does not have a real genius for attention,” Hayes said.
